Fighter Mindset:

From Burnout to the Medal Podium

All images: Greg Funnel

Summer, 1985: Excited (but not entirely sure why) we all lined up in our gym kits on the field behind the primary school. It was sports day, and we were about to get our first taste of competition.

Summer, 2009: I’d been lying on the bed for hours, just staring into the middle distance. The white noise in my head was deafening. My body ached. My throat was sore. Thinking (let alone speaking) was tough. How long had I been feeling this ill? Months? Years? I didn’t have the energy to work it out.

Summer, 2013: Enjoying the misty morning sun on Hampstead Heath, I’m getting my sprints done early so the rest of the day is free for work in my therapy practice. Tonight I’ll be heading to the gym again. The sense of dread this would once have triggered, now a fading memory.

Only in retrospect — and after much analysis — can I fully understand the connection between these three moments.

Life before, with and after chronic fatigue is a study in contrasts.

Making myself sick

I first got ill in the build up to the British Kickboxing Championships in February, 2009. I was due to defend my national Full Contact title and, as usual, I was piling the pressure on.

Training wasn’t going well; I was struggling to make the weight and, annoyingly, I’d twisted my ankle. None of this was particularly new but other stuff was bothering me: I was feeling tired and weak during sessions, and sick to my stomach afterwards. Every time I stood up I’d feel faint. I couldn’t sleep for much more than an hour before my racing heart jolted me awake.

Needless to say, I got beaten that year.

It felt like some kind of virus at first. I was tested for glandular fever, then anaemia and then hypothyroidism. Nothing came back positive and I wasn’t improving. Well, I did sporadically — one of the cruellest things about C.F. is that you can oscillate between feeling paralysed by fatigue and then completely normal for a few days. Each time I started to feel OK, my hope would reignite, then the fatigue would return out of nowhere to crush me and my optimism all over again.

It’s hard for me to believe that I carried on for years in that state. I never really got more than thirty, maybe forty percent of the way towards the fitness levels I’d known before, but fighting — boxing and kickboxing — had become such an integral part of my identity that stopping to rest, recharge and take stock of the situation was out of the question.

So I kept on putting myself at risk, training hard and turning up to big tournaments knowing that one minute after the first bell I’d be dragging my feet and gasping for breath. Not a great strategy when your opponent is hell-bent on knocking you out.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried everything to get better. Over the years I’d given it all a go: Western medicine, Eastern medicine, alternative medicine. I’d tried becoming a vegetarian and a vegan, I cut out caffeine, alcohol, sugar, gluten… Perhaps all those things helped a little. But one thing helped a lot. More than helped; it changed me, fundamentally.

That thing was a simple mental process which took place in a pivotal session with my teacher and therapist, Trevor Silvester.

Enter cognitive hypnotherapy…

Somehow, amid all this, I’d managed to qualify as a Clinical Hypnotherapist and was in the process of studying Cognitive Hypnotherapy. Although I knew how powerful these processes could be, and although I’d seen countless clients make dramatic changes, I have to admit that a part of me still doubted I’d ever truly overcome my own problem.

Still, I wasn’t ready to surrender. I was making a living out of the mind-body connection, and I was determined to find a way to use it for myself (to recover that is, rather than to exacerbate the problem as it was currently doing).

We all know that our bodies produce adrenaline (which we experience as “nerves”) at the mere thought of something potentially stressful like an interview or performance. That feeling is the body is readying itself for action — the old “fight or flight” response — so just telling yourself that the feared event isn’t for another two weeks will have little effect on the physical reaction; your body is still raring to go right now and, when sustained, this takes its toll.

Back in 2009, I was in this kind of heightened state most of the time. I believe this was the cause of my C.F; the prolonged and constant production of adrenaline, a consequence of my forcing myself to fight in contest after contest even as my fitness dwindled. It was only a matter of time before I used up my reserves and burned out.

It was a vicious cycle. The weaker I got, the more I felt like a failure and so my competitive nature would drive me towards my “solution” for that problem; more competition. I thought, “If I can just perform well in this next fight, then I’ll be OK (and then I can rest)”. Of course, that didn’t work because the longer I did this, the less likely it became that I’d be happy with my performances.

The fierce streak

I was competitive from an early age. I’d always presumed I’d simply inherited this from my dad — but there was more to that idea than I’d initially thought.

The process that my therapist and I used in that key session is called “Time Line Reconsolidation”. It’s a simple regressive technique that allows a person to look back into their past from a dissociated position — almost like an objective observer of their own life — in order to shift the way they perceive certain personality-shaping events.

Thanks to the plasticity of memory, our past events can be re-experienced and changed, causing us to remember our history differently; or more accurately, to feel differently about what has happened.

For me, this process revealed a specific memory of a primary school sports day (I was aged approximately five) to be the root event connected to my fatigue. I hadn’t thought of the event in ages and I’d certainly never credited it with any importance. However, the connection soon became startlingly clear.

Childish thinking: the pitfall of the adult mind

Before the age of about seven, children are only capable of a very simple form of understanding called nominal processing where everything is black and white: “good” or “bad”. When a child of this age runs a race with ten others there’ll only be two outcomes: “I won” or “I lost”, and nothing in between.

While we see the world in this oversimplified way, our day-to-day experience is a veritable minefield for processing errors. It’s when we fall into these traps that we tend to form the limiting self-beliefs such as “I’m stupid/unloveable/not good enough” etc. that persist into our adult years and begin to shape our self-image.

Back at my sports day in 1985, I was standing on the starting line getting ready to compete in the 40-yard dash. I can remember seeing my dad waiting for me at the finishing line. When I won the race, he scooped me up into his arms and in that fateful, euphoric moment my little brain came to the conclusion that winning = Dad’s love. Thanks to nominal processing (and probably also to the fact that my dad was away with work for a considerable proportion of the time), this meant that losing = no love, or “I’m not loved/loveable when I lose”. Disaster.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how a fierce competitive streak could develop from that belief. As I progressed through school I would strive to be the best at everything I could in order to avoid the failure that my unconscious mind thought would render me unlovable/unlikeable.

I became a master of thumb wars and arm wrestling. I’d work for hours and hours on assignments, and study night and day for exams. As an athlete, I became obsessed with fitness. I had to be leaner, stronger, faster. But the goal was always a mirage. No matter how much I achieved, as long as I held this fear of failure in my psyche as a motivator, I would never truly enjoy the feeling of success.

Winning brought nothing more than a sense of relief. I was so completely focussed on what I was running from (failure), that I was utterly blind to the possibility of what I was moving towards… yet never reaching (success).

What made the difference

Shifting my unconscious perspective on that old memory was pretty simple. As an adult looking back, I could easily see that my dad would have loved me just as much no matter where I’d come in that race. It’s just that my unconscious had been holding onto my old belief systems because it thought they served me well. After all, who doesn’t want to be the master at thumb wars?

Various methods were used to communicate this simple understanding to the scared little girl inside of me. The unconscious works brilliantly with imagery and metaphor, so we spoke its language to help my five-year-old self feel loved unconditionally. With the memory thusly reframed, I was able (largely) to let go of the old fear of failure.

Getting better

Gradually, after that session, my spells of fatigue got fewer and farther between. The crippling fear of failure? A fading response that I’m much better off without.

There is a physical hangover from my years of anxious overtraining; I don’t think I’ll ever get my body to 100% fitness again, but living in it now is an altogether more comfortable experience.

I carried on competing in the big tournaments that my desperation not to be a failure would have driven me into before; only with this new perspective, I could compete out of a desire to win. The difference was enormous.

Although I won a couple of World and European titles in kickboxing after beginning my therapeutic journey, the achievement that still speaks to me the loudest was my first bout after that particular Time Line session; specifically, the moment when my name was announced as the Elite National ABA Boxing Champion of 2013.

The build up to that fight had actually been pretty horrific. I had to go on a seven day juice fast just a week before the weigh-in to shed the water weight I was carrying around (all five kilograms of it!). I also fractured my wrist a few weeks before the bout, and I was contending with a torn muscle in my thigh. However, no matter what went wrong, I couldn’t shake the subtle yet insistent belief that I was going to win. This was new.

When the fight was over and my hand was raised in the air, I wept. Not out of relief, and certainly not out of disappointment, but due to the sheer novelty of this new feeling called “success”.

FYI, you can make me happy by giving that shiny applause button a good few clicks. Thanks!

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For an exploration of the psychology of self-sabotage (and how to take control), take a look at my book, Fight: Win Freedom From Self-sabotage.